Camping Pictures!

This weekend was our debut family camping trip! I spent the majority of last week making lists, shopping, packing, more shopping, and otherwise stressing about this family adventure we were about to embark on! Our neighbours, the J family, just bought a new trailer, so we invited them to come camping with us. They have two kids, Taryn, who is 7, and Jory, age 10. It was also their debut trip with the new trailer! We spent the week stressing together! :-) When Joshua came home from work on Friday, we loaded up the car and were on our way! We stopped at Wendy's for burgers and fries, and drove northwest to Gull Lake, about an hour and a half drive. We arrived around 9 p.m., set up everything (which went VERY smoothly, by the way!), then went for a short walk to check everything out. The kids were way too wired to go to sleep right away! Eventually it was time for bed. We were waiting for the J family to show up, but they were taking too long. Of course, as soon as we got the kids settled down in their sleeping bags, the J family pulled up with their trailer! They were having a terrible time getting their trailer backed into their campsite, so Joshua went over to help direct them in. Everyone finally got settled in and went to sleep.

The next morning, we had lazy man's omelette's (scrambled eggs with ham, cheese, green onions, red peppers, and mushrooms), bacon, toasted bagels and grapes for breakfast! It was quite the spread!

After breakfast and clean up, we changed into swimming suits and headed to the lake. It was an absolutely beautiful, warm, sunny day! The lake was quite warm. It was also very shallow for a long way out and never got any deeper than our knees! We didn't have to worry about the kids falling off the edge of anything!

There was also a nice, sandy beach that the kids really enjoyed. I forgot to take a picture of the massive playground that was right on the sand, about 3 feet from the edge of the lake!

Later in the afternoon, we went back to the campsite to rest and have snacks, and play some games.

Then, it was time to build fire for supper preparation. The dads decided to each build and their own fire and the competition was on! You should have heard the trash talking the kids were doing on behalf of their dads! Here is Phil's fire with Sara and Taryn helping him add paper!

And on the other side, we have Joshua and Sky, working on their own fire! In the end, Phil had higher flames, but Joshua made better, long-lasting coals!

Of course, no camping trip would be complete without s'mores! It was the perfect ending to a near perfect day!

All in all, the trip was a success. Joshua and I rated it at about 70% successful, which I'd say is pretty good for our first time ever! There were things we forgot to bring, there were a couple of cold showers, a few mosquito bites, but mostly we just had fun. The first night Joshua and I learned a valuable lesson: If you have an inflatable mattress, you must insulate it with something thicker than a cotton sheet. We had wonderfully warm sleeping bags, zipped together, on top of us, but whatever body part was against the mattress was freezing! Who would have thought?! The second night, the J family loaned us some extra blankets to put on the mattress and we were so much warmer! The kids were warm the whole time because they were actually inside their bags and insulated on all sides. (That sentence was for the grandparents sake!!) And sometime in the early morning hours, on the second night, it started pouring rain. Joshua ran out and grabbed all the towels that were drying and anything else that needed rescuing, and threw it in the car. We spent the rest of the night listening to the rain and sleeping off and on. The tent stayed cozy and dry and the kids slept great through the whole thing! When we got up, we took refuge in the J family's trailer for the morning! They fed us scrambled eggs and pancakes. Then, we packed up and came home. Anyway, we're already super excited about the next camping trip in July and are planning more after that too! I'll leave you with two more pictures of the kids that I snapped when they were waking up. Two very different responses to Mommy with the camera...